


Through Broken Glass

by Nightelfbane



Category: Original Work
Genre: Aliens, Androids, Artificial Intelligence, Cyberpunk, Established Relationship, Explicit Language, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Monsters, Vampires, Violence, Yuri, gunfire, gynoids, maybe polygamy?, minor fluff, starships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-21
Updated: 2017-07-21
Packaged: 2018-12-04 21:34:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11563773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nightelfbane/pseuds/Nightelfbane
Summary: Delilah needs repairs, but they didn't have the parts. Their only option was to try and salvage the crashed starship that lay to their south. But between it and them lies a broken city filled with predators.





	Through Broken Glass

**Author's Note:**

> An old work I wrote a few years ago. I don't remember what inspired it.

The crashed starship had always been there, just a few kilometers south of their home. Delilah had always protested when Mei had wanted to go, and until now that had been enough to keep her here. But now Delilah needed parts, Mei needed food and water, and the traders hadn’t been by in months.

The way to the starship was through the Hunting Grounds, the ruins of an ancient city infested with voracious carnivores that ate anything that moved. Mei would have to take their hopper through the city to reach the ship.

Three of Delilah’s avatars helped Mei load the hopper with her gear and supplies. The hopper was usually hidden in a hole covered by a tarp that matched the color of the ground. Mei and Delilah lived in an underground bunker built by an obscenely rich hedonist from the city centuries ago. Delilah was part of that bunker, an artificial intelligence that maintained the bunker through two dozen identical gynoid avatars. Right now, the hopper was parked in front of the entrance of the bunker (also disguised).

Mei was dressed in comfortable, lightweight metal plated leathers, complete with a blaster on her hip and a machine gun across her back. Delilah’s avatars were in their work uniforms, grey jumpsuits with a slash of green across the right shoulder. They were loading the hopper, a hovercraft twice as wide and half again as long as an old motorcycle, with food, water, spare ammunition, and various other supplies. Their skin was metallic silver, and their hair and eyes were shiny black.

Once they were done loading the hopper, Mei got good luck and goodbye kisses from each of the three avatars. The hopper made a _wuhwuhwuhwuhwuhwuh_ sound as she activated it, lifted off, and sped south.

The landscape in this region, called Dezyr, was dry and rocky. Thin streams meandered between boulders and across small expanses of hard packed dirt, forever accompanied by sparse shrubs clinging to the lifeblood of the land. It all passed underneath her hopper as she sped south.

The Hunting Grounds came into view over the endless horizon. Shattered spires clawed crookedly into the sky like broken glass, surrounded by smaller buildings mostly reduced to rubble. From here, the city looked still, but Mei knew the city was a fierce arena of tooth and claw. Blood ran in its cluttered streets like the streams through the plains. Her hopper could fly over the worst of the melee but there were airborne predators that would be trouble, even at maximum altitude. She drew her blaster as she approached the Grounds.

Her hopper _wuhwuhwuh_ ’d past the first broken spires. The buildings were crumbling but still rose up on both sides. Dark, twisted shapes raised their heads and screamed at her from the streets below as they sensed a new predator. She heard the flaps of leathery wings as avian monsters detected her and began pursuit. The first one lifted off from the corner of a crumbled building and launched itself at her. She raised her blaster and fired as she passed it. A pink ray of light turned the creature’s chest into a smoking crater. It fell from the sky, and Mei was already down the street and around the corner before the beasts below began to fight over its corpse.

A six legged creature with several antennae leaped at her from the building to her right. She swerved to the left and the spidery being plummeted to the ground. She centered herself in the street in an attempt to avoid any more dive bombings. Nevertheless, predators hurled themselves out of windows and off ledges in a desperate rush to claim prey. They voiced a variety of screams, shouts, grunts, and whistles as they fell to the cracked ground below. They either died or fought each other in the rubble.

The wind was pushing sweat into her eyes and off her face, but she couldn’t let go of her blaster and she couldn’t release her hold on the hopper’s steering mechanism. _Have to get myself a pair of goggles,_ she thought to herself. An orange segmented worm with a circular mouth lined with serrated teeth launched itself out of a window to her left, alongside a striped feline.

The feline fell. The worm did not.

            The worm was somehow flying through the air the same way it would burrow through dirt. Its mouth latched onto the hopper next to Mei’s leg.

            “Shit!” Mei’s blaster was in her right hand. She pointed it across her body at the worm’s midsection and fired. The pink blast vaporized a few segments and the other half of the worm fell. The mouth end remained clamped onto the hopper, screeching through its hold. Mei’s screams joined the rest, or had she been screaming the whole time? She fired repeated shots at the worm and it was blasted into bloody chunks. It finally fell from her hopper.

            The street widened and eventually the land bound creatures stopped throwing themselves off buildings to get at her. However, more winged creatures attempted to bite, sting, eat, or otherwise maim her as she wound her way through the Hunting Grounds. She blasted, dodged, and raced her way past them. By the time she was out of the city, the sun was setting and she could see two moons in the sky, one red, one white. She landed her hopper well away from the city on a large, flat topped rock that stood about three meters in the air. She had camped here on this rock a few times before, mostly to scavenge at the very edge of the Hunting Grounds where predators were small and few.

            She used a lighter to start a campfire with wood from the supplies and curled up in a bedroll. She slept fitfully, with Delilah’s name on her tongue. In the morning, she brewed a cup of coffee over the embers of the fire and hung her legs off the edge of the rock while she sipped it. This area of Dezyr has a large amount of rattlesnakes, and the bigger they got, the more they rattled. The morning was alive with it. The traders that passed by the bunker say that some of them grow so large and vicious that they migrate into the Hunting Grounds.

            Eventually she stowed her gear on the hopper and took off again. She left the rattling rock behind as she travelled further south, towards the wrecked starship. It was half buried in a crater. She couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It was grey, from dusty Dezyr. Parts of it were smooth and spherical; others were jagged and lumpy like the outlines of trees or bushes. At the same time, there was an odd symmetry to it. _It would probably be a lot clearer if I could see the whole thing_ , Mei thought. She flew the hopper in circles around the ship, looking for an opening. Unable to find one, she set down on the east side of the ship, the one with the largest portion in view. She set up a laser scanner from her hopper on the edge of the crater to see if it could find an opening she had missed.

            The scanner couldn’t find an opening so she moved to the south side. This time, the scanner detected a hole too small to see during her circles. She packed up her equipment and took her hopper down to the opening. It was a jagged crack that reached about a meter off the ground, just a little narrower than what Mei would be comfortable with. She crouched down and peered inside, using the flashlight on her machine gun. The crack opened up into a space inside the ship that she couldn’t quite make out. It looked like there was a ladder inside covering the opening.

            She tried to squeeze inside the crack, but her plated leathers made her too large to fit. She would have to go in unarmored.

            _Fuck that._ Mei flew the hopper a little ways up the crater and ran back down to the crack, kicking up dust and sending pebbles rolling farther into the crater. She squatted down next to the crack and deposited a small object before jumping up and sprinting away. She hadn’t quite gotten to the hopper when the grenade exploded. She turned and looked back. When the dust cleared, the crack had turned into a cave entrance. She took the hopper back to it – she wanted to be able to make a quick getaway if necessary. Machine gun ready, she entered the starship.

            She moved past the hull and into the open space she saw earlier. It was a corridor, wide and low roofed. The walls curved from the floor until they met at a point maybe 10 centimeters above her head. There were rods sticking out of the floor on both sides, which she assumed to be ladders, which meant the ship was on its nose or back. On the right, there was a curved corner. On the left, the corridor continued into darkness. She decided to go to the right and see around the corner, but when she stepped around it she had to grab one of the rungs to avoid falling into a large chasm. Her flashlight couldn’t reach the other side or the bottom and she really didn’t feel like climbing today, so she went back past the hole and continued on into ladders’ the corridor. She took a device from her belt and turned it on. It would map her path through the ship and allow her to find her way out again, while also scanning the ship for parts she could use to fix Delilah.

In the meantime, she shined her flashlight all over the corridor, making observations. Unlike the exterior, the inside of the ship was uniformly smooth and rounded. The ladders’ rungs were spaced far apart, making Mei think that they were built for a tall people. She couldn’t see any technology but her was scanner was picking up inactive power conduits in the walls. The ship had been crashed for as long as she could remember, but most of the technology was still in working order.

She continued down the corridor until she spotted a large hump in the floor far ahead of her. She noticed more details as she got closer. It was oval shaped, and the top of it reached to her waist. It had three lines of long spikes sprouting backwards out of its top. She moved ahead to take a look at the front of it. The hole on the bottom made her think the thing was a shell of some sort. She crouched down and peered inside, but it was empty. Likely the organism that inhabited it had either left or decayed since the ship had crashed.  

She stood back up and thought for a moment. If the ship was built and crewed by a crustacean-like species, they wouldn’t need the ladders. They couldn’t even use them. What were they there for?

She shrugged and moved on past the shell. The corridor began to slant downwards. As she descended deeper into the ship, her scanner began to beep. One of the parts she needed to fix Delilah had come into scanning range when she descended the ramp. About 10 meters down, 4 meters forward. She quickened her pace down the ramp, glancing down at the scanner every few seconds.

The ramp continued on until the part was well behind her and then curved into a U-turn to the right before levelling out. Now she was level with the part and it seemed to be just down the corridor. She quickened her pace until she was almost jogging down the corridor. The scanner beeped faster and faster until she came to a hatch in the curved wall. She pried it off with her knife and looked inside.

It seemed to be a maintenance hatch, with a set of tools on the left that were not suited for human hands. The part she needed was on the right. She used her own tools to disconnect it from the ship without damaging it. She also took the alien tools and a few other parts she could reach, figuring she could sell them to the traders the next time they came by the bunker.

The rest of her search went similarly, wandering around the ship with her scanner, picking up useful bits and pieces for Delilah and the traders. By the end of the day, she had filled her pack with scavenged parts and scrap metal. There was a slight scare when it appeared her scanner hadn’t recorded her way out of the ship, but a few good knocks to the wall set it right. She walked over to the hopper and stowed her pack before lifting off.

Her rest on the rattling rock was much more peaceful than the last. She had all the parts they needed to fix Delilah, and to make a good profit off the traders the next time they rolled around. Her morning coffee tasted a lot sweeter.

By the time she was in flight on the hopper, her good mood had mostly dissipated. She was not looking forward for another trip through the Hunting Grounds. She could see the broken glass city coming up in the distance as she pulled her blaster from its holster. As the Grounds came closer, she could even see some of the larger creatures in their eternal predatory dance.

Before she even entered the city, flying creatures were on her. She blasted a winged serpent with a vicious stinger out of the sky before dodging a dive bombing from a flailing mass of clawed tentacles. The streets where she had entered were narrower than they looked when she chose her entry point. She had to weave left and right to avoid falling monsters while simultaneously blasting airborne creatures out of the air.

 _I need to get to a wider street_ , Mei thought. She took a turn that looked promising, but all it did was lead her into a pack of draconic creatures. Their scale armor was dark green, and they all had crests of black horns on their head. Each one was maybe half again as large as the hopper. They were in the middle of tearing into some creature they had snatched from the ground when they spotted her. They dropped it immediately and went after her. Already at the hopper’s maximum altitude, she had no choice but to drop below them and try to race past them. It was successful at first, but the drakes were surprisingly fast and maneuverable. Unbound by the technological limitations of the hopper, they were able to fly over buildings and cut corners to reach her. On the plus side, the other predators seemed to have backed off in the face of the drake pack.

A drake on her left tried to swoop down from above but she blasted it in its face. Her blast took off two of its horns and it screeched and pulled away. She turned another corner to the right. The drakes kept on her, constantly trying to close for a bite. Her blaster kept them off for a time, but eventually one closed behind her while she was busy dealing with one on her right. It latched on with its two front legs while its wings flapped frantically. Her hopper rolled dangerously to the right. She blasted the drake repeatedly, pink bolts of light slamming repeatedly into the drake’s chest. Finally, it fell with a smoking hole through its torso. Unfortunately, its claws were hooked into the hopper and she was dragged to the ground along with the drake.

Mei’s screams were cutoff when she was thrown from the hopper upon impact. She landed hard on her right shoulder with a grunt. The drake had landed a few meters away. Fortunately, its large carcass was acting as a distraction for the ground predators that would normally have swarmed her. Three creatures of nightmare were currently tearing into it now, prying off scales and forcing their jaws inside the hole she had blasted in its chest. This seemed to enrage the drake’s pack mates, who screamed savagely and descended upon the monsters eating and approaching the drake.

The hopper was damaged, but it was still alive enough to hover a few centimeters above the ground. Mei ran over to it and dragged towards a nearby building. The building was half crumbled, with a large hole in its front face, surrounded by rubble. She dragged the hopper over the rubble and into the building. There was a large pile of rubble in the back of the room, leading up to a hole in the second floor. Part of it spilled in front of a corner in the room, providing minimal shelter in that area. She shoved the hopper behind it just before it died completely and crashed to the floor.

Mei poked her head over the rubble to get a look at the street. The drakes were still fighting the scavengers over the corpse of the drake. She turned back to the hopper. The drake’s claws had damaged the engine. In fact, one of its claws was embedded in the hopper. She tucked it away in one of her belt pouches and opened up the hopper. She scrambled for the tools she needed and got to work, occasionally looking out at the street to see the state of the melee. It seemed to be thinning out as the drakes slaughtered any predators that tried to feast on their fallen pack mate. She started working faster.

“Come on, _come on!_ ” she muttered under her breath. The hopper didn’t want to wake up. The sounds of dying animals in the street weren’t helping her concentration. She looked out at the street again. The drakes were lifting off with the corpse of their pack mate in their claws, while the monsters on the street had given up and were attacking each other. It wouldn’t be long before one of them picked up her scent and followed her in here. She turned back to her work, wiping sweat out of her eyes. She was almost finished, just a minor adjustment here and connecting that to that… _yes_! The hopper hummed back to life, again floating a few centimeters above the ground. She was about to mount it and get the hell out of there when she heard a voice.

“ _Why so eager to leave, sweetling?_ ” The voice was like smoke over silk. “ _Turn around_.” Mei found herself unable to disobey. Slowly, twitching, trying to resist, she turned around.

At first, Mei thought the woman was wearing patchwork clothing but no, she was completely nude. She was covered in so many colors of blood there wasn’t a centimeter of bare skin anywhere. She couldn’t even tell what color her hair was, it was in wild disarray, clumped and caked with multicolored blood. The color of her eyes, however, was clear. They were as black as Delilah’s, but instead of shining with artificial life, they absorbed all the light that entered them. They were as empty as a dead riverbed.

The bloody woman stalked towards her with deadly, catlike grace. Mei’s cheek was twitching uncontrollably now as she tried to resist the predator’s compulsion.

“ _Tip up your head_.” Mei obeyed. At the sight of her bare neck and more importantly, her wildly pumping carotids, the woman smiled, revealing a set of long fangs. She licked her lips and crouched, leaning forward to drink her fill.

So focused she was on her prey, so focused her prey was on her predator, neither of them noticed the crouching form near the wall. Neither of them noticed its haunches waggle as it prepared to pounce.

Its sideways jaws latched onto the vampire’s right shoulder. They ripped her fangs away from Mei’s throat just before they spilled arterial blood. The vampire shrieked and turned its attention to the beast. They rolled away from Mei and tore at each other with crazed abandon, screaming the whole time. The beast that had saved Mei was grey and hairless. Its mouth was like a dog’s, but it was placed sideways on the face. Sprouting above it was a segmented eyestalk carrying a green and red orb. Its mouth was still locked around the vampire’s shoulder, shaking her viciously. She was retaliating with a clawed left hand, digging bloody furrows into the side of the dog-thing.

The spell on Mei was broken. She stood up and grabbed her machine gun. She took aim and fired indiscriminately at both monsters. Her gun sang a harsh, repetitive song as it spat hollow points at the frenzied creatures. The dog-thing took rounds to the side of its chest and fell over instantly. The vampire was more resilient. Rounds hit her in both shoulders, the abdomen, and one blew off the left half of her head. Her screams turned to a blood choked gurgle. She still tried to crawl forward on the arm that hadn’t been ravaged by the dog-thing.

The drum on Mei’s machine gun clicked empty. She dropped the gun and pulled her blaster. Bolts of pink slammed into the vampire at point blank range, silencing the gurgling. Mei kept firing until the blaster beeped an overheat warning and powered down. She was now alone with her screams.

Her arm slowly lowered, her hand trembling. Her breath was coming in huge gasps. She shook her head and turned back to the hopper, but was distracted by the sound of a couple of animals near the door. Another one of those dog-things, and a huge, disturbingly human mouth set in the middle of six digitigrade legs. They were advancing towards her. She raised her blaster again and pulled the trigger, but all that happened was a beep.

“ _Fuck!_ ” Her blaster was still venting heat. If it tried to fire now, it could explode in her hand. She dropped it and went for her machine gun, and the beasts at the entrance charged her. The drum was empty, so she pulled it off and threw it at the dog-thing. That distracted it for a second, but then the mouth barged into her and knocked her over onto the mound of rubble leading to the second floor. She kicked it off, and it fell onto its side, legs flailing. It was moaning in a deep, low voice. Mei pulled a fresh drum from her belt. She reloaded the machine gun and turned towards the dog-thing, but it pounced on her before it could fire. It clawed her face, drawing screams of pain from her. Its mouth closed around her chin, and she heard cracks as her teeth and mandible broke. Blood flooded her mouth and choked her screams. She managed to get the barrel of her gun into the beast’s gut and pull the trigger. Dark orange blood gushed from its mouth and splashed her face, mingling with her own crimson.

Mei staggered to her feet. The mouth was just managing to regain its feet when she emptied the drum into it. She managed to sling the machine gun over her shoulder and stumble over to the hopper, grabbing her cooled blaster off the floor. The blood of the dog-thing and of her own heart dripped off her chin as she mounted her hopper and sped out of the building.

Her trip out of the city was a blur of speed, pink bolts of light and vicious monsters attacking her whenever they could. She struggled to remain awake as she left the city and flew over the dusty plains. She was already fading in and out of consciousness as she landed / crashed the hopper outside the bunker entrance. Blood covered what remained of her chin and had dripped onto her chest plates and ran down in dark rivulets. Her hands were soaked in it as they banged on the bunker’s big, circular door. The last thing she heard was the door sliding open as she slipped into blackness as dark as the vampire’s eyes.

Mei awoke in her and Delilah’s bed. She closed her eyes and moaned groggily, but Delilah, wearing a grey jumpsuit under a white lab coat, placed her metal finger on her lips.

“Shh, don’t try to talk. I’ve bound your jaw. We need to wait for it to heal before we begin more extensive repairs and replacements.”

Mei nodded and examined her surroundings. She was in their bedroom. Another of Delilah’s avatars, this one in a green dress, was playing the grand piano that had belonged to the hedonist years ago. The music floated lazily around the room, easing the tension out of her muscles. Another avatar in a lab coat was injecting medicine into an IV that was in Mei’s arm. Delilah smiled at her, shiny black eyes warm.

“I installed the parts you brought back. They’re working fine, and should hold out for years longer.” She bent down to kiss Mei’s bandaged forehead. “Can you sit up?”

She could, and Delilah slipped into bed behind her and laid her head in her lap. Soft metal hands massaged Mei’s shoulders as the piano lulled her back to sleep.


End file.
